Dance with Me / Comedy Dance Chicago

Cancer, Comedy and Catharsis

Exploring how my experience of cancer could become a comedy dance, with Justin Kimball and Sarah Beck from Comedy Dance Chicago.

By Peter Lovatt · Chicago, April 2026

Peter Lovatt with Justin Kimball and Sarah Beck of Comedy Dance Chicago. April 2026.

Project

Dance with Me

My contribution

Idea, conversation & movement co-creation

Collaborators

Justin Kimball & Sarah Beck

The work

Initial workshop · April 2026

The dance exchange

First, we danced.

As part of Dance with Me, we each share a dance that reflects our movement personality. In Chicago, I taught Justin and Sarah a routine to We No Speak Americano. They taught me a comedy dance with a Titanic theme and a dinosaur.

Sharing my dance

I teach Justin and Sarah my routine to We No Speak Americano. A little of my movement personality, passed on.

Learning theirs

Sarah and Justin teach me a Titanic-inspired dinosaur duet. There is a great deal to learn about timing when your arms are this short.

They are brilliant. From the way they angle their heads and pause, to the way they move around the stage to build a gag, to the expressive movements that deliver the punchline, they are masters of their dance comedy craft.

I was hopeless. Like a beginner tap dancer in a professional tap class, I was always a dozen beats behind with a fixed expression of bewilderment.

The story

How we got there

Earlier in 2026 I was working on a project called Dance with Me. It is a dance psychology collaboration in which I meet professional dancers from different disciplines, we talk about the psychology of dance, and we dance together.

Also earlier that year, I was told that my cancer had spread to a lymph node and I was now considered Stage 4. Five years after surgery, I moved from surveillance to another period of active treatment.

In April I met Justin Kimball and Sarah Beck from Comedy Dance Chicago at The Second City in Chicago. After sharing our dances, we sat down and talked.

We talked about being silly, and the things that stop us. Sarah described discovering that fun was one of her personal values. Initially, she had felt embarrassed about that. Wasn’t it a bit immature? Justin spoke about the word “cringe”, which he hates, particularly when it is used to stop people trying something in dance or comedy.

We talked about the expectation that, as adults, we should become increasingly serious, and what happens to our movement when we become worried about looking ridiculous.

There was a great deal of craft behind their silliness. They described building a comedy dance around something people recognise, establishing an expectation, and then changing it. Both the timing and the expression are important. A tiny pause gives an audience time to understand what a character is feeling.

We also talked about music, and how a song can take someone straight back to a particular time in their life. A piece of music can arrive with a whole personal history attached to it.

An idea to try

Could we dance this?

Towards the end of our conversation, we discussed making something new together. I had been thinking about an idea since an earlier call with Justin, but I wasn’t sure whether it had enough comedy in it. I started trying to explain, and almost immediately began apologising for it.

“Stop apologizing for it. Be confident with it,” said Justin.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I found myself walking as fast as I could. Marching, really. I needed to let some emotion out. I also found myself listening to an old 1970’s song by the Charlie Daniels Band called The Devil Went Down to Georgia.

The song tells the story of Johnny, a fiddle player. The devil challenges him to a fiddle-playing duel. If Johnny wins, he gets a fiddle made of gold. If the devil wins, he gets Johnny’s soul. When I listened to the song, the devil was my cancer. I was Johnny.

The song has always been cathartic for me. Johnny wins. At the end, he is confident enough to invite the devil back for another go.

I wondered whether we could make a comedy dance from this. We would replace the fiddle-playing with a dance-off. I would be Johnny, the person with cancer, and Justin would play the devil. I still wasn’t convinced there was enough comedy in the idea. Sarah and Justin thought there was.

Justin started thinking about how we could tell the story. Perhaps it would begin with the diagnosis. I would put on my headphones, start listening to the music, and the devil would appear. He liked the possibility of starting somewhere real, somewhere that might make people a little uncomfortable, and finding the comedy there.

We considered an opening with me sitting in a chair receiving chemotherapy. Sarah suggested a spotlight, centre stage, and the devil emerging from underneath my arm. These were staging ideas for the dance. We were working out how this thing that had occupied so much space in my head could become another character on a stage.

Then we considered the dancing. Justin suggested that the devil could be technically brilliant, producing beautiful, accomplished movement. I would answer with complete freestyle, thoroughly enjoying myself. The audience might reasonably think the devil was the better dancer. We could have some fun with what happened next.

The idea changes

A different ending

Sarah suggested that the two characters might almost form a friendship.

That opened up another possibility. I spoke about living with cancer. Justin wondered whether the devil might start doing my dancing, and whether we could end up dancing together.

“It might be rather lovely.”

My response to the idea of the two characters dancing together.

I had spent years listening to Johnny win his duel. Now we were considering an ending in which the devil was still present. We could explore what happened between us, how we responded to each other, and whether there might be moments when we could enjoy the same dance.

We got up and started trying it. There were practical questions to work through. How would the devil appear? What would I do when I first saw him? We explored refusal, pushing him away, and his return. We considered how my movement could develop, and when the two characters might start responding differently to each other.

A movement for each of us

I suggested that we each needed a signature move. Justin would have a movement that belonged to the devil. I would have a little movement of my own. Later, when we came together, we could dance both movements.

“So it sort of ties us together,” I said.

That gave us something specific to work with. The audience could see two separate characters, recognise their movements, and then see those movements shared.

Inside the collaboration

A few moments from the workshop

These stills come from our initial workshop in April 2026, when we were trying out ideas for the piece.

A personal starting point

The starting point was a song I had connected with after my diagnosis. Together, we began considering what it might become.

Putting the idea on its feet

Working with Sarah and Justin on how an imagined encounter could begin, and how the characters might respond to one another.

Finding a shared movement

I suggested a signature move for each character, with the possibility of bringing both movements into the same dance.

A beginning

Something we could build on

After a run-through, Justin asked how it had felt.

“Felt fantastic,” I said.

We talked about editing the song and developing the piece properly. Sarah explained that this was the sort of work-in-progress they would bring to their collaborators: something they could see, respond to and build on. There was still work to do. We had a beginning, characters, movement and an idea for where the relationship might go.

Later, Justin spoke about the connection that can happen when an audience laughs with someone who is allowing themselves to be vulnerable. We returned to the idea of the two characters becoming friends and dancing together. There could be laughter and something personally meaningful in the same moment.

I had offered them something that had helped me express how I felt about cancer. Together, we had begun turning it into something other people could watch. I was curious about how far we could take it.

About this piece. This account describes an initial creative workshop in April 2026. The dance was a work-in-progress, developed together by Peter Lovatt, Justin Kimball and Sarah Beck. The cancer story is drawn from my own experience.

The people and the project

Dance with Me: a dance psychology collaboration led by Peter Lovatt.

Chicago collaboration: Peter Lovatt, Justin Kimball and Sarah Beck of Comedy Dance Chicago. The Second City, Chicago, April 2026.

We shared existing dances, talked about the psychology behind them, and began developing a new piece together.

Programmes / Performance / Collaboration

Have a project in mind?

I’m interested in making programmes and performances that explore human experience through dance. I’d be pleased to hear from producers, agents and creative collaborators.